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January 19, 2016

Much discussion has transpired this year about women vis a
vis Hollywood: about percentages of women directors, producers, etc. and about
salary equity -- a discussion fueled in part by information revealed in the
Sony hack and by Jennifer Lawrence’s outspokenness. Yet for all the talk, we
found ourselves in the midst of remarkably talented actresses who gave us a
cornucopia of praiseworthy performances in 2015, though women of color were
notably absent from the screen. (I very much regret that, living where I do, I
did not have the opportunity to see Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq,” Lee’s contemporary
interpretation of Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” a play of which I have always been
enamored.)

Four especially penetrating films focused on women that
articulate a wide-ranging cultural critique. Taken together their impact should
be nothing less than profound. “Room,” “Brooklyn,” “Carol” and “45 Years” have
rightfully received their nomination due in awards in advance of the Oscars.
Their impact has been amplified with greater complexity by the indie jewel
“Tangerine,” giving us more reason for rejoicing.

The first decent movie of 2015 was Kenneth Branagh’s
“Cinderella.” Lily James is the perfect embodiment of Ella, Cate Blanchett
gives the Wicked Stepmother psychological depth, and when you say, “Fairy
Godmother,” it’s a given Helena Bonham Carter be cast. Kate Winslet is
wonderful as the unconventional landscape architect Sabine de Barra, who risked
her career by rejecting the symmetrical design conventions of her era to create
an unruly Romantic garden complete with grottos in Alan Rickman’s Louis
XIV-period drama “A Little Chaos.” (Rickman himself, in a wonderful turn,
played Louis XIV. He will be sorely missed.)

Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman in "A Little Chaos"

Winslet was also a knockout as Steve Jobs’s Apple marketing
executive and confidant, Joanna Hoffman, in Danny Boyles’s film, for which she
is receiving much-deserved recognition. Marielle Heller’s “Diary of a Teenage
Girl,” starring Bel Powley in a performance that has also
garnered award endorsements, also features a compelling supporting
performance by the talented Kristen Wiig as her immature but sympathetic mother.

A clever satire on celebrity, Olivier Assayas’s “Clouds of
Sils Maria” treads the boards of the self-reflexive trope of actors playing
actors, specifically the older actress supplanted by the hungry, would-be
starlet, but Assayas uses our expectations to subvert an “All About Eve”
fatalistic inevitability. The film features nuanced performances from Juliette
Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloe Grace Moret as strong-willed, independent
women. Binoche challenged Assayas to write a film about women that left the
rounding out of the characters to the actresses.

Binoche’s Maria is an
international actress accompanied by her multi-phone wielding personal
assistant, Val (Stewart). Maria’s mentor, the playwright who cast her in the
role of a — perhaps manipulative — young woman in a relationship with an older
woman, has died on the eve of the play’s revival. Moret as Jo-Ann Ellis is a
paparazzi-baiting bad girl who has been cast in the role that made the young
Maria a star. Maria’s commitment to her craft is juxtaposed with Jo-Ann’s pop
culture celebrity in a film that is not ashamed to grapple with large questions
of aesthetic and ethical concerns about artistic authenticity.

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in "The Clouds of Sils Maria"

Jennifer Lawrence is front and center in her third
collaboration with David O. Russell and his troupe as the determined inventor
of “Joy.” Paul Weitz brought the marvelous Lily Tomlin back to the big screen
in “Grandma” rounding out a smart ensemble with Julia Garner as her
granddaughter and Marcia Gay Harden as her daughter -- and with grace and humor
they tackled the subject of abortion.

Winningly co-starring with their leading men, accomplished
actresses had an opportunity to shine in little romantic vehicles: Dan
Fogelman’s “Danny Collins” with Annette Bening and Al Pacino; Brett Haley’s
“I’ll See You in My Dreams” with Blythe Danner and Sam Elliott; and Isabel
Coixet’s “Learning to Drive” with Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley. All three
highlighted leading women on their own terms against their leading men.

If those pairings sparkled with chemistry, Marion Cotillard
and Michael Fassbender utterly seethed with it in the Scottish play, directed
by Justin Kurzel, and I found Alicia Vikander’s performance in Tom Hooper’s
“The Danish Girl” more charismatic than the gender-bending Eddie Redmayne’s.

Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in the Scottish play

Alicia Vikander also stars as Vera Brittain, a young woman
who defied convention, first by attending Somerville College, Oxford, and then
by leaving to become a nurse on the front lines in the Voluntary Aid Detachment
in James Kent’s “Testament of Youth,” adapted from Brittain’s First World War
memoir for the screen by Juliette Towhidi. Abi Morgan’s “Suffragette” with
Carey Mulligan, Helen Bonham Carter and Anne-Marie Duff and Peter Sollett’s
“Freeheld” with Julianne Moore and Ellen Page took on women’s issues,
historical and contemporary respectively.

We also saw women in roles more typically inhabited by men.
Taylor Sheridan’s script for Denis Villeneuve’s Mexican border drama “Sicario”
cast Emily Blunt as a principled FBI agent caught in the murky amoral
underworld of Mexican drug cartels. Peter Straughan’s script for David Gordon
Green’s “Our Brand Is Crisis” was based on Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary of
the same name about the campaign marketing tactics employed by James Carville
and his Washington-based political consulting firm GCS for Gonzalo Sanchez de
Lozada in the 2002 Bolivian presidential election. Sandra Bullock lobbied for
the role of the central character, based on Carville and originally intended
for a man.

In the realm of comedy stars, Melissa McCarthy has been
developing her own version of franchise since 2013, this year’s installment
being Paul Feig’s “Spy,” and with “Trainwreck,” Amy Schumer joined Judd
Apatow’s repertoire of responsibility-phobic characters that went co-ed in 2011
with “Bridesmaids.” (N.B. Jason Moore’s abysmal “Sisters,” with Tina Fey and
Amy Poehler, should never have been made.)

In addition to the supporting roles already mentioned,
superb performances abounded in which a woman forms a kind of fulcrum between
two male characters. Elizabeth Banks grounds Bill Pohlad’s “Love & Mercy” as
Melinda Ledbetter, the savior who comes to the rescue of John Cusack’s older
Brian Wilson (to Paul Dano’s younger) from the grips of his abusive therapist,
Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). In a poignantly understated performance as
the great detective’s housekeeper in Bill Condon’s “Mr. Holmes,” Laura Linney
exudes an inarticulate love for the young son she lives to protect and
endurance toward the irascible old man in her charge, marvelously channeled
through Ian McKellen.

Ian McKellen and Laura Linney in "Mr. Holmes"

In the triad of excellent performances for Joel Edgerton’s
“The Gift,” Rebecca Hall plays Robyn Callum, a woman pulled between the
manipulations of her husband on the one hand (Jason Bateman) and the forgotten
acquaintance (Edgerton) who shows up out of nowhere to haunt him. Laura Dern is
the distraught mother of an unemployed, young single father, played by Andrew
Garfield. Her salt of the earth son gets sucked into the home foreclosure
racket by a ruthless real estate broker, played by Michael Shannon, in Ramin
Bahrani’s chilling “99 Homes.”

The coming of age catalyst for the central character in
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s “Me (Thomas Mann), Earl (RJ Cyler) and the Dying Girl,”
is Rachel. Olivia Cooke navigates a beautiful re-invention of the dying girl
trope sans sentiment and treacle. In “Youth,” Paolo Sorrentino gives Rachel
Weisz’s supporting role as Lena Ballinger almost equal weight with the film’s
co-stars: Michael Caine as conductor/composer Fred Ballinger -- her father --
and Harvey Keitel as film director Mick Boyle -- her father-in-law. Lena’s
point of view enriches this meditation on age by considering the friends
through the lens of the mature child and by presenting her understanding of
Fred, not as an artist, but as a father and a husband to her mother.

Even before 2011, when his personal and creative
collaboration with actress/writer Greta Gerwig began, Noah Baumbach explored
multi-dimensional women in films like “The Squid and the Whale” (2005) with
Laura Linney and “Margot at the Wedding” (2007) with Nicole Kidman and his then
wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh. This year brought two Baumbach films, “While We’re
Young,” for which he has the sole writing credit, and “Mistress America,” which
was co-written with Gerwig. Like Apatow’s and Feig’s shallow creations,
Baumbach’s characters have failed to grow up, but they differ by possessing a
depth and complexity that the Apatow/Feig woman- man-child lacks, and as
Baumbach’s films reach their denouements, we usually have a sense that the Baumbach/Gerwig
character is going to come to terms with the necessity for maturity.

Speaking of Jennifer Jason Leigh, I do not want to overlook
a performance that could have been ridiculously over the top but is not in
Quentin Tarantino’s admittedly gory homage to the American western, “The
Hateful Eight.” The range Leigh manages to achieve, through subtle facial expression
alone, is beyond various: the contempt and scorn of a psychopath, the wounded
hurt of a child or injured animal, the manipulations of a coquette, the
defiance of an outlaw. Leigh seems to effortlessly traverse the gamut.

Jennifer Jason Leigh in "The Hateful Eight"

Of the plethora of astounding performances by women this
year, four especially stand out, each a marvel of quiet subtly that dazzles.
“Room,” “Brooklyn,” “Carol” and “45 Years” -- all four, each in its own way,
share a quality of extraordinary eloquence through what isn’t said.

ROOM

I had seen Larson in small parts like Greenberg’s niece in
Baumbach’s 2010 “Greenberg” with Ben Stiller and then in Oren Moverman’s 2011
“Rampart” with Woody Harrelson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s 2013 “Don Jon,” at
which point she’d done over a dozen more roles in feature films. Yet when I
encountered the force of nature that she is, in Destin Daniel Cretton’s 2013
“Short Term 12,” it was as if for the first time.

I started to write that in
“Short Term 12,” Larson plays Grace..., but that would be wrong: Larson is
Grace. She is both Grace the character, a supervisor at a short-term group home
for troubled teens, and she is the embodiment of grace. Introverted by nature,
she works with her boyfriend, Mason (John Gallagher, Jr.), who tries to draw
her out, but for reasons that remain mysterious, whatever it is she feels she
must guard fills a deep well of empathy she quietly yet ferociously shares with
her charges barely younger than herself. In a delicate dance of ensemble
reciprocity, Cretton’s cast touchingly captures the pain that is borne of abuse
and the meaning of unconditional love.

Brie Larson as Joy and Jacob Tremblay as her son, Jack, in "Room"

To our wonderment, Larson dips into that seemingly
bottomless emotional well again in Lenny Abrahamson’s “Room,” which Emma
Donoghue adapted for the screen from her novel. Larson is Joy. Kidnapped at 17,
she has been held captive in a dingy soundproofed room for seven years. Her
salvation has been her son, Jack, and the action opens on the eve of his fifth
birthday. Somehow, she has managed to raise Jack as a happy, well-adjusted
child, allowing herself a pure joy in his being that he returns in the
circumscribed life they share. Just as Jack is becoming old enough to start
asking questions, Joy’s captor loses his job. The vitamins are not restocked; the
heat bill goes unpaid. Joy understands the degree of their desperation, but an
attempt to escape is fraught with danger, too. Larson’s visage can convey a
deeply complex range of emotional subtlety, and we learn more about her and her
relationship with Jack through what we see than through what she says, not
simply about herself and Jack, but about the endurance of the human spirit.

Joan Allen deserves praise, too, for a poignantly perfect
supporting role as Joy’s mother, a performance that has been wholly overlooked
except by the Indiana Film Journalists Association. Allen almost silently
conveys the tangle of a mother’s emotions in parallel with her daughter’s: the
anguish, not only over the horror of her daughter’s captive experience, but of
a mother’s pain in the knowledge that she will never fully fathom that
experience. This understanding, in relation to her unabashed exultation in her
daughter’s strength, perseverance and ability to have somehow spared Jack the clinically
predictable consequences of having been raised in such unimaginable
circumstances, infuses the film with a humanity almost impossible to describe.

BROOKLYN

Saoirse Ronan is the immigrant Eilis Lacey at the center of
John Crowley’s bildungsroman, “Brooklyn.” Nick Hornby adapted the screenplay
from Colm Toibin’s novel, and everything from the superb ensemble cast to
Michael Brooks’s score to Yves Belanger’s cinematography to Jake Roberts’s
editing is a quiet revelation. Just as during and after the potato famine of
the 1840s, the United States generally and New York City especially, with its
large Irish population, provided a beacon of hope for Irish young people
fleeing a foundering rural economy in Ireland. As a wartime non-participant, Ireland received no help from the Marshall Plan that aided war-torn
Western European countries. So in 1952, Eilis joins this wave of young people.
A New York City parish priest (Jim Broadbent) has sponsored her passage, she
secures lodging in a boarding house for young women, and she finds work in an
upscale department store. She is a complex mix: overcome with loneliness but
braving the unknown, filled with a sense of familial obligation but determined
to forge her independence.

Saoirse Ronan in "Brooklyn"

Like Larson’s Joy, Ronan’s Eilis conveys her fluctuating
feelings in her countenance. Writing for The Guardian (8 Nov. 2015), Mark
Kermode says that Ronan, “the miraculous still centre of this beautiful,
old-fashioned” movie, “appears to have developed the ability to act with her
pupils, which seem to widen and contract at will.” Early in the film, and
before Eilis meets her Italian beau (Emory Cohen), her fellow roomers take her
for a dupe for agreeing to help with the parish’s annual Christmas dinner for
the needy -- men, the priest explains, who built the city’s tunnels and
bridges. It is a beautiful scene -- who cast this movingly realistic roomful
over which the camera lovingly pans? -- in which one of the men, played by
Iarla O Lionaird, stands and sings the achingly beautiful Irish love song
“Casadh an tSugain” acapella.

When Eilis arrives back at her boarding house, her landlady,
Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters), invites her in for a nip of sherry. Little is said;
Mrs. Kehoe makes small talk, Eilis demurs. Yet in the course of this scene
following her Christmas experience in the parish hall, Ronan’s face registers a
deepening understanding of her privilege and good fortune, of the opportunity
others have made possible for her, of her responsibility to make good on their
generosity as well as her responsibility to honor the truth of her own self.
What Ronan wordlessly conveys in these fleeting moments propels the balance of
Eilis’s coming of age in America.

CAROL

Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in "Carol"

Phyllis Nagy adapted Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel “The
Price of Salt” for Todd Haynes’s “Carol.” Cate Blanchett is the titular
character whom we meet just at the point in her unhappy marriage when she is
trying to break free. All that holds her is a deep maternal bond with the young
daughter she adores. Out Christmas shopping, she encounters a department store
clerk -- who, we will come to learn, is an aspiring photographer -- Rooney Mara,
in an equally stellar performance. They fall in love, but it is 1952. All that
can’t be said in “Carol” is paralleled with a visual leitmotif: expanses of
glass -- shop and house and car windows, automotive windshields. What we see
behind the glass is often obscured by rain or snow or the trickling humidity of
fog. Glass is a barrier but a transparent one, and, like taboos, can be broken.

45 YEARS

Love stories are often cute or saccharine or otherwise
superficial, none of which interests Andrew Haigh. His 2011 “Weekend” deals
with the complexity of love, its messiness, its often bewildering lack of
logic, its clumsiness and its intimacy. It is also a film about identity, the
separate identity each lover confronts within the other and the thing between
them, which becomes a third entity. “Weekend” is about the 48 hours two young
men share; “45 Years” is about a life-long marriage confronted with an
unexpected intruder who shatters that third entity. Written by Haigh from a
short story by David Constantine called “In Another Country,” “45 Days” begins
a week before the 45th wedding anniversary Geoff and Kate Mercer are preparing
to celebrate.

Then, on the erroneous assumption Geoff is next of kin, a
letter arrives explaining that the ice-encased corpse of Katya, his first love,
has been recovered from a mountain crevasse she fell into as she and Geoff were
hiking in the Swiss Alps 50 years earlier. Katya’s sudden presence is the wedge
that opens a parallel fissure in Kate and Geoff’s marriage, and Haigh again
confronts us with the complexity of love and the possibility that there is no
such thing as a happy ending, at least in the conventional way we understand
that phrase. Yet, whereas “Weekend” teems with the rich quickening and buoyancy
of new love, “45 Years” exposes a long-ignored emotional vacuity through a
specter frozen in ice and time that catches each spouse off guard.

Charlotte Rampling in "45 Years"

The couple is played by veteran actors Tom Courtenay and
Charlotte Rampling in an anti-grand pas de deux communicated almost exclusively
through gesture and expression. In his review for the New York Times (Dec. 22,
2015), A. O. Scott observes that “Mr. Courtenay, a naturally demonstrative
actor, registers a convincing blend of longing, confusion and shame. Ms.
Rampling, a stiller, deeper-running pool, conveys emotions so strange and
intense that they don’t quite have names.”

That this many actresses achieved such heart-stopping
performances this year — especially the intoxicating renderings from Brie
Larson and Joan Allen, Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, and
Charlotte Rampling -- is a veritable embarrassment of riches. They have
elevated our story through characters that speak to women’s resilience and
self-sufficiency through their endurance under circumstances of exploitation to
the point of enslavement (“Room”), their dignity and independence (“Brooklyn”),
their inherent nurturance and bravery in the face of the status quo (“Carol”)
and their emotional vulnerability despite strength of character (“45 Years”).
As interesting as the men were this year, the women on screen shone a brighter
light on the better angels of our nature.

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Nancy Kempf holds a B.A. in Literature with a minor in Philosophy from the Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts, which was the first institution of higher education in the U.S. to develop a rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum. She completed graduate work toward a Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma. She has taught English at the Universities of Oklahoma and Arkansas and the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, and has written and lectured extensively on American and world cinema, including contributing articles to Berkshire Fine Arts, New York Theatre Wire and ARTES Magazine.